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Trump followers say this because of their own agenda. When they say Democrats want to destroy America, they mean that they believe the public school system is brainwashing their children into believing in Communism.Trump’s followers therefore want to destroy the public school system, the US postal system, and other such institutions. Their goal is to destroy the federal government, or at least reduce it, and then let every state be able to decide everything on its own.P.S. To Sharon Russell and anyone else who thinks it’s clever to write a comment and then block me: that doesn’t protect your comments from deletion.

What do I think of Ayn Rand?She was a parasite, a third-rate hack novelist turned philosopher and “economist,” who somehow infected a paranoid alcoholic racist megalomaniac Richard Nixon with the shallow, neo-Darwinian rationale he needed to justify his personal (not patriotic) agenda.In college, I read everything she wrote - except for Atlas Shrugged. I even played a lead role in the one godawful play she ever wrote. Do you know what I remember? In every one of her works, a woman is raped by an alpha male, and she comes to love it. Rand was worse than political vermin. She was a true pervert, a misogynist sicko freak.By the way, she spent decades publicly denying any correlation between smoking and lung disease, as a paid spokesperson for the tobacco industries, writing soliloquies about the joys of smoking; and she continued to deny it after her doctors showed her x-rays of her own black and shriveled lungs.Do you know what Rand did, as she was dying from lung disease?The darling of conservative economics - the person who single-highhandedly inspired the lie that a safety net equals “socialism” - she accepted both Medicare and Social Security.[1]That’s what happens to demagogues and other extremists when they finally confront death or unbearable circumstances. Instead of embracing her toxic philosophy, she betrayed it, exposing the cowardly hypocrite living under the slipping mask. She was an opportunist - pure and simple - not a martyr to her own convictions - that’s for sure.In a nutshell, she believes people in no way depend on each other.There is no social contract whatsoever, when this position flies in the face of everything we know about history, biology, anthropology, psychology, sociology, and yes - economics! Successful economies require trust and collaboration, embodied in what we as capitalists call “the law of comparative advantages.”The fascist capitalist state she advocates? Its weaker version has led the United States economy to crash every ten years and four times during my 50 years on this planet. Greed is never a virtue - it only leads to one catastrophe after another. Anyone with a lick of sense should get that.Alan Greenspan was a meditating hippie before he became Rand’s protegee. As Chairman of the Fed, the most conservative economic mind in the nation helped to drive the economy to collapse by keeping interest rates so low, it led to a borrowing frenzy.In the end, Greenspan confessed in congressional testimony there was something wrong about the way he thought the world works. Well, he learned it all from Rand. The congressional committee's Democratic chairman, Henry Waxman, pressed him:"You found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right, it was not working?" Greenspan agreed: "That's precisely the reason I was shocked because I'd been going for 40 years or so with considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well."[2]He made other comments to this effect. But he and Nixon represent only two glorious examples of how her “philosophy” has derailed the conservative movement, plunged like a clown car off a political cliff.The most recent example? Paul “It’s the law of the jungle” Ryan.He’s a huge fan of Rand. Well, Paul - no one knows for sure - but about 10,000–20,000 years ago, we left the jungle and started this thing - it’s called a civilization - because we did not want to live by the laws of the jungle. We learned we accrued more wealth and technology better through differentiated collaboration than brutal competition.Her continued credibility boggles my mind, except she supplies a myopic and selfish mindset the moral blinders required to reject the obvious: We formed societies because we recognized our economic and social interdependence made us stronger individuals.There is no such thing as the public interest? Does anyone sane take that one seriously? We created democracies, based on the premise of the public trust. We decided our leaders should compromise, holding them accountable to the public interest. If she opposes democracy, she supports a fascist state, cloaked as dystopian meritocracy.We’re better off profiting from one another in mutually beneficial ways than pillaging each other. Her gross error in judgement? Self-interest and the public interest are not mutually exclusive.What would the world really look like without a regard for the public interest and altruism? No one survives - much less thrives - in developmental, creative and intellectual isolation.That’s pure bullshit.Every so-called self-made millionaire out there succeeded because other people made sacrifices. Parents for starters. Without tax-payer funded medical research, the military (veterans), public facilities and academic institutions (school teachers)…your average entrepreneur would not exist. But you owe no debt to the public trust?It satisfies a reductionist “survival of the fittest” amorality, but it does not comport with human nature, fundamentally tribal and interdependent. Even Darwin lamented how this evolutionary mantra became a corrupt human moral mandate.Where would we be without taxation and regulation? Would you step on a plane not inspected by the FAA? Could we ever expect to maintain our global competitive edge without free and affordable public education?Bottom line, no one wants to live in the brutal, nasty and lonely world she envisioned. Where did her political and economic philosophy take her? Despite her fame and political influence, she ended up poor enough she needed government assistance.No one can breathe in a social vacuum. When the day comes you need help from others - in the form of a social contract - you will take it, regardless of your rigid political ideology.She did. See point four above.Footnotes[1] When Ayn Rand Collected Social Security & Medicare, After Years of Opposing Benefit Programs[2] Greenspan - I was wrong about the economy. Sort of

I am a New Zealander, living in NZ and I keep up with just the big news in the world of the Royals (QEII is Queen of NZ, by the way). When Harry was single he was seen by the press and the people as the loveable rascal. When he first met Meghan she was adored in the press, so the break with the Royal family came as a bit of a surprise. You can gloss over tabloid press articles about her bullying staff and demanding luxury as being false or just half truths. From a distance you can understand a desire to drop out of the harassment of the tabloid press - but there is a great deal of reputable journalism in the UK.It may seem silly but a fictional Netflix show like The Crown helps us understand the stultifying obligations that being a part of the Royal Family brings. Few other families have to make decisions based on the greater good and public opinion rather than individually. Not doing something you want because it would harm the monarchy seemed anathema to Megan. Maybe Meghan didn’t fully understand what that meant - nobody could until they experience it themselves. However it is hard to believe that she had no clue - unless she was deluded by her own agenda - which is what the interview showed.The interview:Harry and Meghan were not on the same page with their life goals even though Harry might think they are.Meghan shamelessly played the “race card” in an obvious effort to suck in the American viewers and project America’s experience of racism on her story. Adept and calculated and divisive, damning the whole RF by leaving out the alleged perpetrator. When Harry arrived he reacted very differently to the story. He had clearly been upset by someone in the RF making the comment but showed that Meghan had deliberately implied it was about Archie and had occurred during her pregnancy. However, Harry said it was a comment from before they were even married and Meghan had not actually heard it. She intended to imply that the whole mechanism of the RF was one of systemic racism and was caught out in her lie.Oprah had an agenda and her shameless “noddy” (staged reaction shot) of “What!!??” demonstrated more than anything else that she was complicit in building an argument. Not once did she question the obvious inconsistencies in Meghan’s tale of oppression. Oprah dropped immeasurably in my estimation.